


The Parcel Loop

by ActuallyGimli



Category: Original Work
Genre: Car Accidents, Guilt, Horror, Mental Institutions, Multi, Nightmares, Other, Psychological Horror, Psychology, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:35:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23205586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyGimli/pseuds/ActuallyGimli
Summary: Is this a dream, a nightmare, or a horrible reality? Follow young Timothy through the darkest corners of his subconscious to find the truth. Battling his monsters alongside and yet so far away from his mother, Dorothy, will they ever realize who the true villain is? Guilt is a powerful and monstrous poison.





	The Parcel Loop

The rain outside the musty apartment is picking up as Dorothy gathers her keys and puts on her coat to make a run to the market. Though the storm brewing past the windows makes for an ominous evening, Timmy is still excited to stay home alone for the first time. A twenty-minute trip to the store is small business, but to an eight-year-old, it seems like the freedom of an adult with his own apartment.  
Timothy hugs his mother then she darts out to run her errands. He turns back to the small living area and contemplates what he might do in her absence, reveling in the freedom. But first, he prances towards the bathroom. His thought begin to wander. Maybe he'll bring all his toy cars out to the dining table and play with them there. His mother's rule is that he may not have toys on the table. However, she is not her to stop him now.  
When he exits the bathroom, having foregone washing his hands, he spots a parcel on the coffee table. Had this been there before he went to the toilet? It must have, packages do not simply appear out of nowhere. Wrapped in plain brown butcher paper and tied with a stained and tattered blue ribbon, Timmy notices his name is not written on it, but it must be for him.  
Quickly sitting down between the sofa and the table, he unties the dirty ribbon and peaks beneath the crinkled paper. It is a magazine, or maybe not. There is no title on the cover like his mom's fashion magazines or his dad's sports papers. In fact, there are no words at all, no models or cars, just an ugly floral pattern that looks oddly familiar. The yellowing pages feel old, almost brittle, and there is a reddish-brown smudge on the decorative cover. The kind of stain that sends shivers down your spine.  
Timothy realizes the gift must not have been for him, but he has almost fifteen minutes to sneak through the pages un-caught before re-wrapping it and putting it back where he found it. He opens the cover to find the same ugly pattern, but this time it is printed on a curtain against a faded beige wall. He realizes why it seemed so familiar. Timmy looks behind the couch to the curtain above the window, it is the same ugly floral as the one in the magazine. Even the wall color matches... strange.  
Turning another page, he sees a photo of his front door. It is a plain wooden door surrounded by fading beige walls and a dark oak shelf to the left that holds their shoes. The picture shows his dirty sneakers, his father's work shoes, and several pairs of his mother's heels. When he glances up, the shoes are arranged precisely like the ones in the magazine — except his mother's blue pumps are not nearly as dirty as the picture shows. They appear to be smeared in mud, awfully red mud.  
The pages continue showing small snippets of the apartment with perfect eerie detail. For such an old magazine, the photos must have been taken quite recently for them to have his dirty cereal bowl from breakfast in the sink and the crayon marks on his nightstand from two nights ago. His mother, Dorothy, has not scolded him for ruining the furniture yet, so he doubts she took the photos. The question remains, then, who took the photos? Why make a book with them? And, perhaps most crucial, how is the photo album remarkably aged and dirty if the latest picture is from this morning?  
With a vague sense of unease, Timothy turns the last few pages of the magazine with no words. The final picture is of the room behind him, showcasing the window and the stormy sky beyond. The thunder and lightning have picked up significantly since he found the mysterious parcel. He closes the last page and sees the image on the back cover, it is a replica of the previous page with the window and the ugly curtains.  
Wait, there's a silhouette in the window this time! It is a towering figure of a man. A jolt of adrenaline runs down Timmy's spine, and he can not seem to make himself look back at the window behind him. The magazine has been accurate so far, what if a thief or murderer is watching him right this minute?  
Lightning flashes, and the page before him illuminates the scarred face of the silhouette for just a moment before returning to a static image. Timothy no longer wants to be home alone, he wants his mother to come back and protect him from the scary man with the scars on his face. It takes him a few minutes, but he gathers his courage and stands up to glance at the window. Nothing. It is pitch black outside, and it seems that only his imagination can hurt him.  
As his shaking nerves start to calm, and he is about to turn his attention away from the glass, lightning strikes again, and his heart jumps in his chest. The monstrous man with the scarred face is outside watching him through the panes. Terror overtakes him, and he bolts out of the living room down the hallway to his mother's room, slamming and locking the door behind him. As tears fill his eyes, he climbs under the bed and tries to hold back the panicked sobs threatening to break out in the deadly silence.  
The sound of glass breaking almost causes him to let out a shriek, but his paralyzing terror silences his outburst and roots him in place as he listens for footsteps in the apartment. A slow and heavy thudding of boots walking toward the hallway, taking their agonizing time, catches his ear. The light from the hallway shines under the bedroom door, and Timmy can see the large boot-clad feet of the intruder as he approaches the door. The doorknob twists slightly before the person realizes it is locked. No doubt, the giant beast of a man could burst the door down with ease, although it is bolted shut.  
He does not break the door down, however. The gigantic monster of a man with the scarred face simply stands in the hall for several minutes, though it feels like hours. Timmy wonders if this waiting game is not perhaps worse than being murdered quickly. With his heart pounding in his chest, he looks to his right and finds a lost toy car under his mother's bed. It is the blue Corvette, the same as the car his mother is getting groceries in right now. Where is she? Shouldn't she be home by now?  
Drawing Timmy's attention back was the sound of rustling paper as the man places something on the floor and strolls back down the hallway. The apartment is silent for nearly an hour before Timothy gets brave enough to climb out from underneath his mother's bed. He creeps quietly toward the door and listens intently for any movement in the house. When all that greets him is more calm silence, he slowly unlocks and opens the door to reveal another parcel on the floor wrapped like the first — tied in a dirty blue ribbon.  
Passing the package by altogether, Timmy quietly sneaks down the hallway toward the living room, checking his bedroom, the kitchen, and bathroom as he goes. The window is not broken. In fact, nothing seems out of place or stolen. It is as if his mind had been playing tricks on him. Timothy stares back down the hall to the unopened parcel on the floor; no, this was absolutely real.  
Nearly two-and-a-half hours after Dorothy left for a quick trip to the market, her son curls up in her bed with the door locked holding the second parcel. The dirty blue ribbon is slightly crusty, and Timothy has a sick feeling that it may be dried blood. He tugs the tie open and unwraps a second magazine.  
This time, the magazine looks more ordinary, except there still are no words on the cover. The front does have a car — or, at least, a close-up of a single tire under a blue fender. With swelling dread, he flips quickly through the first few of the old yellowing pages, it is his mother's car — a 1967 Corvette Stingray in a pale blue. Each page is a close-up of a single piece of the vehicle, a door here, the hood there, even the backseat has its own page. The final page is of the driver's seat, empty, just as the window had been in the first magazine.  
The back of the page taunts him. Will he see his mother driving home from the store, late but safe? She has been gone too long, what if she has been in an accident? Closing his eyes, Timmy flips the last page closed and prepares himself for the worst-case scenario — his mother dead at the wheel. When his eyes open, he gasps in shock at what he sees. Spread across the back page is not his mother, Dorothy, driving the car, but rather the scarred man with his mangled face and bloodied hands.  
A sinking feeling washes over him as he realizes his mother may not return from the store. Perhaps the creepy man with the scarred face killed her. Clutching the magazine and sobbing into the sheets, Timothy falls into a restless sleep an hour later, sniffling on-and-off.  
Light trickles in through the bedroom window, gently easing Timmy into wakefulness. He untangles himself from his mother's sheets as the events of the previous night come crashing down in his consciousness. Scrambling to his feet, he looks through the covers frantically searching for the magazine — it is not there. The living room is empty of the other journal, and Dorothy never returned home.  
Timothy is momentarily lost and confused, then remembers the nice elderly lady across the hall. He slips on his sneakers and hurries out of the apartment and across the hallway to Mrs. Doris' place. She opens the door after several frantic knocks. When she sees the desperation on young Timmy's face, her own becomes painted in concern for the boy.  
"What's the matter, child?" Doris asks, taking on a familiar motherly tone. In a way, she feels like a second mother to him. For a moment, Timothy just flounders for words — too distraught to articulate his panicked thoughts. When he finally regains his voice, his words are so jumbled that the only thing she can pick out is that this child's mother is missing. The elderly woman quite clearly recalls, however, that this child has no mother to speak of.  
"I'm afraid I don't understand, dear." She says to the panicked young man. "Perhaps you could call your father? I have a landline inside if you know his work number." This confused Timmy even further; everybody that knew his father also knew that he was almost always away on work trips and could not be reached by telephone.  
"My father's on a work trip again, he's been gone for weeks. I can't call him." This admission puzzled Doris greatly, for she had just seen the boy's father last night. And, pray tell, why would a corvette dealership owner ever possibly need to be away on a business trip? Perhaps young Timothy had simply had a nightmare, as some youngsters do.  
"My dear boy, you must be mistaken," She tried to soothe, "I saw your father just last night." Timmy froze at the divulgence, had his father indeed returned home the night before? Was his mother, Dorothy, safe with him? Had this all been some sick prank or nightmare? Timothy was unsure.  
Just as he was turning back to the apartment door after thanking Mrs. Doris, he heard her mumble something that made his blood run cold as ice. "Shame about that boy's father, he'd have made such a handsome man without all those scars." Timmy's father had not so much as a scratch on him. In fact, his charm was the pride and joy of his sales company — and the reason he was never home. It was not his father that Doris had seen last night, no, it was someone much, much worse.  
With his head hung low, Timothy reluctantly opens the door to his own apartment and is immediately startled to see a pair of dirty boots in front of him. He looks up to the towering figure above — a monster with scarred skin and bloody, dirty black clothing. The giant does not speak or so much as move an inch, he simply stands still while holding the third parcel in his outstretched hands.  
With mounting fear, Timmy runs to the first open room, the bathroom, and bolts the door closed behind him. He flicks the light on, and to his dismay, there the package sits — neatly placed on the commode lid. His breathing calms as the minutes tick by; there is no sound outside the bathroom and another ribbon waiting to be untied. With trepidation, he unwraps the third parcel.  
This magazine is similar to the first in that the cover is printed entirely in a pattern, only this time, Timmy recognizes it as the pajama pants he is currently wearing. He turns the page and is met with the leg of his blue checkered pants against the bathroom tile. Except, at the bottom of the page, a dirty black boot is just visible covering the bottom of his pajamas. When he looks down and sees his bare feet against the tiling, he lets out a sigh of relief that for once, the magazine seems wrong.  
Slowly turning the pages, it is apparent that most of the book consists of close-ups, various parts of the bathroom, with the occasional shirt sleeve or pant seam from his own attire. Toward the end of the magazine, the close-ups of his clothes reveal black stains covering them. It is still a relief to look down and see no black stains on his shirt or pants.  
The next image is of a hand, his hand, but an ugly scar runs across the top of it — when checked, the injury does not exist outside of the book. Page after page, the close-up photos of Timothy get grimier, bloodier, and more covered in scars. The last image is of his face, no scarring, not a single scratch. Preparing himself to turn the last page closed and look at the back cover where the biggest horror usually hides, his heart skips a beat. The current image shows his face split open on his left cheek like a gash.  
Timothy quickly gets to his feet and views his reflection — nothing. Timothy slowly sides back down in the floor, returning to the page showing the sliced-up version of his face, he finally closes the book. It is the same image from the previous page, his face with a gash across the left cheek but nothing more. Unexpectedly, a single drop of blood falls onto the magazine from Timmy's face. He puts his hand over the gaping wound and stands up, just barely registering that a dark figure materializes on the page behind him. When he looks into the mirror, his eyes widen, and he lets out a blood-curdling scream, not because of the scars littering his face and body, but because the scarred man is directly behind him.  
"No!" He screams at the monster, trying to get out of the room but being held in place by sturdy and marred arms. Gashes continue to rip open and scar back up across Timothy's skin. Glancing into the mirror, he sees that the deepest scar is on his left cheek, and matches the one on the man behind him. Timmy is reminded of something old Mrs. Doris had said earlier, she had called this beast his father.  
Stalling in his futile attempts to escape, Timothy murmurs a one-worded question, "dad?" The grotesque arms loosen from his waist, and he turns to look at the man who seems somehow much smaller than moments ago. "No," the scarred intruder replies, "I am you." With those words, the disfigured monster vanishes without a trace: I am you.  
The bathroom feels suffocatingly small all of a sudden. Timothy turns around looking for the magazine, in the mirror is the man with the scarred face. He stares face-to-face at his own reflection, then looks down at his grown body in amazement and horror. How could the monster from yesterday be him today; if a day ago he was only a child? Where did the scars come from?  
Confusion crept upon him, and answers seemed far more important than his own disfigurement. With his mother, Dorothy, still gone and possibly even dead — though he did not want to think about that — Timothy made the decision to seek out Mrs. Doris for help a second time. His clunky boots took him out of the apartment and down the hallway to the old woman's door. Yet, when his knock was answered, it was not a sweet woman at the door, but rather an old beer-bellied man.  
"Is Mrs. Doris home?" he asked anyway, ignoring the agitated look of the man at the door. The tenant gave a confused yet angry lift of an eyebrow before replying, "Ain't never been no Doris here, Tim. Ya should know that. We've been neighbors for twenty-three years." Twenty-three years?  
In a subdued panic, he lumbers back to his own apartment. He is about to turn the knob when he hears his mother's soft voice on the other side, repeating the words she had said to him the night before. She tells his younger self to be good while she gets a few things from the store, then the door swings open, and Dorothy breezes past him without so much as a glance. "Mom?" he calls after her, yet she does not seem to be aware of his presence as she leaves him for what may be the last time.  
Tim turns around in time to just get a glance at his eight-year-old self heading to the bathroom like he had the night before. Could this be a loop in time, he thinks. Walking back into the living room, he looks for the package only to find the table empty; then, he realizes something materialize in his coat pocket. He pulls the parcel from his sizeable inner pocket and places it on the coffee table then leaves the building.  
His intention had been to leave and never return, sparing his younger self the fear and anguish he had previously suffered — yet somehow, he ended up climbing the fire escape outside as if on auto-pilot. Reaching the eighth-floor window, he sits in the rain and darkness, watching as the events unfold before his eyes beyond the glass. It is inevitable: the lightning strike, the scream, the terror-stricken face of his youth. Like a car crash, or a bad movie, he can not seem to look away or leave — last night will repeat itself. This time, though, he will be both the child and the monster.  
As expected, the young Timothy turns to the window, and with a flash of lightning to illuminate his current scarred face, he sees for the first time how horrified he had looked before. Is he truly so mutilated that the mere sight of him can induce the purest face of terror and disgust? With a scream, his boyish-self sprints down the hallway to hide underneath his mother's bed again. For the first time, Timothy wonders: how many times has this scene played itself out?  
With a loud crashing sound, he is suddenly inside the apartment again. Tim looks behind himself at the window, yet it is not shattered. The noise he had yesterday associated with the breaking of a glass pane, now sounds far more treacherous — like the crashing and crumpling of an automobile accident. The looming feeling that something is horribly wrong with this timeline increases second by second, eating at his nerves with every trepidatious step down the hallway.  
When Timothy reaches the bedroom door, he already knows it to be locked but is compelled to make sure, twisting the knob only once, before looking away. Then a photo of him and his mother hanging on the wall catches his attention. His father is behind the camera, but he can clearly see himself as a toddler held in his mother's arms by her new beige and wood-paneled station wagon. Dorothy always did love that old car, it is the only one she ever drove, even when offered to take his father's more expensive company ride for a spin.  
Another package materializes in his inner coat pocket, and he places it down by his feet in front of the door. Perhaps, if he just follows along with last night's events, he will wake up from this terrifying nightmare. He leaves the parcel and trods back down the hallway, then out the door to the parking garage — it oddly feels like he is looking for something, yet he can not place it. Maybe, he has hope that his mother will pull up in her blue Corvette, safe and happy to see him.  
Wait! Dorothy drives a beige station wagon, why would she arrive in a sports car she never even owned? Why does Timothy so vividly remember the blue vehicle and not the one he should be searching for? He rushes back inside, perhaps to look for answers, or maybe to open the parcel himself — the one that contains images of a blue Corvette Stingray. This reality is starting to make less and less sense, and yet, the panic is no less real.  
When he arrives back at the apartment, Tim realizes more time had passed than reasonably possible — it is already morning. Young Timmy is panicking to Mrs. Doris, who is apparently living in the same apartment as the drunken man. Tim sneaks through his own door before his more youthful self sees him.  
Creeping down the hallway to his mother's bedroom, he passes the photo of her with her station wagon, feeling ill at ease. He crawls under the bed in a repeat of the night before, or perhaps now it has been two nights — the concept of time has alluded him. The space feels smaller now, cramped like a crushed metal box or a coffin. Then he sees it, the blue toy Corvette. He is not hiding under his mother's bed, he is the monster lurking there. Memories come flooding back, and he feels sick to his stomach. Timothy watched his mother die — even caused her death.  
Dorothy had gone shopping, dragging eight-year-old Timmy along for the trip, and had gotten him a toy car to pacify his boredom. In his excitement, he had not been able to restrain himself from opening the small box in the car on the drive back home. He remembers nagging persistently until his mother agreed to look at his shiny new Corvette figurine. That is when everything went wrong.  
The crash echos in his memory, sending chills down his spine. His mother only glanced away for a moment to appease his begging, yet it was too long — too late. The horrid image of her head smashing through the windshield and bouncing back lingered in his thoughts. The glass cut a deep gash in her left cheek, the same place his scar holds.  
His mother is never coming home. Dorothy is dead, and he killed her. Not a dream or a time loop, this is a real nightmare. He wishes to wake up, wants to curl up in his mother's arms, and tell her he loves her. Yet, the realization of this story continues on.  
Tim walks with solemn acceptance to the living room, takes the third parcel from his coat, and holds it out, waiting for Timmy to walk back through the doorway. When the boy walks in, he bolts to the bathroom and locks himself inside. The package in his shaking, scarred hands vanishes, and he can only assume it is now on the toilet seat where he had discovered it before.  
Just as the parcel had vanished from his marred hands, he too vanishes from the living area and re-materializes in the bathroom behind himself. The pain and anguish displayed on the growing boy before him compels Tim to wrap his arms around the horrified child in an attempt to console him. He watches as the transformation from child to monster happens before his eyes and just barely registers the confused question hanging in the air. "Dad?"  
Loosening his arms from the mirror image of his own repulsive body, Timothy prepares to inform the young lad of his true nature — of his greatest tragedy. "No, I am you," he begins, ready to tell the story of his mother's death to the one who caused it — himself. The bathroom around him starts fading out to blackness, yet he perseveres in his quest to unveil the truth.  
"I am a monster," the revelation brings the first tears to his mature frame. "I killed her," he chokes out. Tim repeats these words over and over like a mantra, "I'm a monster, I killed her." The all-consuming blackness slowly transforms into a bright light too harsh to look at. He closes his eyes against the harsh whiteness, all the while, trying to close his heart to the pain. Yet, the sobs echo on, as does the acute agony of loss.  
As he feels someone is shaking his shoulder, Timothy looks around the unfamiliar room, squinting against the harsh light. A man in a nurse's uniform has a hand on his shoulder, the words he is saying are muffled and unrecognizable. Tim is in a wheelchair. Why? Other people are in wheelchairs, too. Is this a nursing home, a mental hospital, or a care facility of some sort?  
As Timothy's hearing comes back into focus, sobs fill his ears. They are his own — he has been crying. Reaching a hand up to wipe his face, Tim feels the scarring and begins to weep harder. The dream fades, and the memory floods in.  
The stern hands of the nurse shake him gently to get his attention again. "I killed her," Timothy breathes out on a tremor, "I'm a monster." He can only manage those six words, like a mantra, locking himself further inside his own mind. The nurse is speaking again, but Timmy does not hear. Just barely, he notices an oddly familiar, elderly nurse approach him — she has a deep scar on her left cheek.  
The older nurse, Doris, relieves her younger co-worker from having to comfort Timothy. She approaches her son, smiles into his uncomprehending eyes, and whispers back to his muttering, "You didn't kill me, you are not a monster." The, "I am the real monster," goes unspoken as it has for the past twenty-three years. However, it is far too late for apologies.  
Doris wheels Timothy back to his room at the Oak Ridge care facility. With every repeat of those six horrible, gut-wrenching words, her heart breaks a little bit more. Once medicated and readied for bed, Timmy is tucked in the sheets by his mother — sobs still echoing in the small room. The nurse turns out the light and stands still, watching the grown man drown in his guilt.  
"This is not your fault, it was never your fault," Dorothy whispers to the shaking boy she once knew. She can not bring herself to say, "I love you," like a mother should, even after all these years of torment. A loving mother would never have let this happen. The last words spoken are, "I am so sorry," but they will never be enough to cover the scars she has left behind on her son's heart. This is her fault. This burden of guilt she has to bear now, for those harsh words spoken many years ago.  
For twenty-three long years, Dorothy has worked at Oak Ridge, watching over her greatest achievement and her greatest mistake. Timmy was the light of her life, now all she can see in him is her own shortcomings as a mother. The last words he ever understood her to say re-play daily in her memory, "This is all your fault, you could have killed us!" It was a moment of weakness sparked by fear and pain, but it was the last time her boy's eyes showed recognition of the world around him. He was lying in a hospital bed, covered in nearly as many bandages as her when his eyes went blank, and he retreated into his self-destructive mind. Looking back, she asks herself how she could have ever snapped like that. What kind of mother was she?  
From that moment forward, the nightmares never stopped plaguing her son — taking over his young life. The only words he has uttered in the many years since being, "I killed her, I'm a monster." She will never hear Timothy call her name again, can't bear to hear anyone else say it. Her name-tag reads Doris instead of Dorothy by choice because she might break down if anyone besides her baby boy calls her by that name. She prefers to never be thought of as Dorothy by anyone else.  
Dorothy finishes her shift and goes home to an empty apartment; it is dingy and run-down, but she refuses to leave the only place Timmy ever called home. Running her right hand over the wedding band on her left finger that she never took off; she remembers when her husband left her and their only son. "You can't move on," he had said, "and I can't live like this, stuck in the past, reliving your nightmare with you. He's gone, and if you can't see that, so am I."  
The empty bathroom greets her with yellow lights, buzzing with age. She stares at her reflection in the mirror, traces the scar with her fingertips, and wipes away the nightly tears. The monster staring back, scarred and ugly as the one in her son's nightmares, wears her face instead.  
The hallway has a musty unclean scent and dirty carpet from years of walking the same worn path from bathroom to bedroom, always stopping to peek inside Timmy's room as she goes by. It is just as he left it; toy cars in a jumble on the floor, scribbles on the nightstand. The only thing ever cleaned is the dust as it settles — she never even made the bed. Her goal, to keep the room looking the same when, or if, he comes home, not tidy and organized, but also not covered in layers and years of dust and abandonment.  
Peering into the room, Dorothy imagines her baby boy playing with the cars or asking for "just five more minutes," before she puts him to bed. The silence washes over her in a cold shiver, and she closes the door to the empty bedroom slowly before retreating to her own.  
Her bedroom frosts the fragile bones of her misery with its desolate temperature. The worn and rarely-washed sheets are no comfort to her aching heart. Washing the room in darkness, she turns the decades-old lamp off like every night for the past twenty-three years. She weeps until she falls asleep again, alone in her apartment, just as Timothy cries himself to sleep in his room back at the facility.


End file.
